Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

New Use Of An Old Discourse Marker: The Interface Of Implicit Attitudes, Explicit Attitudes, And Rapid Language Change Of "So", Syelle Graves

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates a linguistic feature called “backstory so,” defined as discourse marker so when it prefaces the answer to a question or request for information from an interlocutor. The motivation for its investigation is a collection of highly negative internet comments expressing irritation and insulting attitudes toward this use of so and the people who say it, calling them annoying, inarticulate, and condescending, for example. I also examine controversy in the (limited) literature about whether or not this language feature is new.

I therefore first present findings that this use of so is an instance of rapid language …

De-Centering The Monolingual: A Psychophysiological Study Of Heritage Speaker Language Processing, Christen N. Madsen Ii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Models of grammar, processing and acquisition are primarily built on evidence from monolinguals and adult learners of a second language. Heritage speakers, who are bilinguals of a societal minority language, acquire and use their heritage language in informal settings; but who live, work, and are educated in the societal majority language. The differences between heritage speakers and both monolinguals and adult second language learners are extensive: heritage speakers are not educated in the heritage language, their input is typically not from a prestige variety of the heritage language, and they are dominant in the majority language, using it more frequently …

The Sound Patterns Of Kachok In The Context Of Bahnaric And North-Bahnaric Studies, Emily L. Olsen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a description of the sound patterns of Kachok, Austroasiatic language spoken in northeastern Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia. The language is spoken by approximately 3000 people and is considered endangered (Simons & Fennig, 2018). Kachok is undocumented, and this dissertation is the first attempt to describe the language and its sound patterns. The goals of this dissertation are twofold: to contribute to linguistics and the science of phonetics and phonological typology, as well as increase the body of work on Austro-Asiatic languages, and to create resources for the Kachok language, culture, and people that have the potential to outlive …

Phonetic Properties Of Oral Stops In Three Languages With No Voicing Distinction, Stephanie M. Kakadelis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Almost all studies on the phonetics of oral stop voicing patterns focus on languages with a voicing distinction. This gives rise to some debate regarding which aspects of voicing patterns arise from inherent articulatory effects related to the production of a voicing distinction, and which aspects are intentional adjustments by speakers meant to enhance a phonological contrast.

This study investigates the phonetic properties of oral stops in three No Voicing Distinction (NVD) languages; Bardi (bcj), Arapaho (arp), and Sierra Norte de Puebla Nahuatl (azz). NVD languages do not utilize the larynx to maintain a contrast between any two sounds in …

An Experimental Study Of The Differences Between "Just" And "Only": Npi Licensing And Modal Scope, Taletha Callahan-Kanik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout much of the theoretical semantic literature, the two exclusives only and just have been assumed identical in their structures and semantics. This manuscript contests that assumption, using parallel examples with negative polarity items (NPIs) and modals to demonstrate the asymmetry of these exclusives. After reviewing the existing theoretical literature, I utilize these examples to inform an experimental study centering around NPIs. This experiment (influenced by Chemla, Homer, and Rothschild (2011)) employs an acceptability judgment task where participants (n=90) are asked to judge sentences containing negation, only, and just (both with and without NPIs) on a 6-point scale.

Using …

Syntactic Processing And Cross-Linguistic Structural Priming In Heritage Spanish Speakers And Late Bilinguals: Effects Of Exposure To L2 English On Processing Illicit Structures In L1 Spanish, Ian Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines real-time heritage language syntactic processing and tests the hypothesis that some commonly observed properties of heritage languages—apparent instability in grammatical knowledge and divergence from monolingual grammatical norms—can be attributed to cross-linguistic influence from the socially dominant language during online processing. To test this hypothesis, a novel cross-linguistic structural priming experiment based on self-paced listening was conducted with a group of heritage Spanish speakers and late Spanish-English bilinguals to test whether exposure to preposition stranding in English—a feature of core syntax that does not exist in Spanish—could facilitate processing of (ungrammatical) preposition stranding in a subsequently encountered Spanish …

Recursive Neural Networks For Semantic Sentence Representation, Liam S. Geron

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Semantic representation has a rich history rife with both complex linguistic theory and computational models. Though this history stretches back almost 50 years (Salton, 1971), recently the field has undergone an unexpected shift in paradigm thanks to the work of Mikolov et al., 2013(a & b) which has proven that vector-space semantic models can capture large amounts of semantic information. As of yet, these semantic representations are computed at the word level, and finding a semantic representation of a phrase is a much more difficult challenge. Mikolov et al., 2013(a&b) proved that their word vectors can be composed arithmetically to …

Amount Superlatives And Measure Phrases, E. Cameron Wilson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides a novel analysis of quantity superlatives by bringing together research on three interrelated topics: superlative ambiguity, semantic constraints on measure constructions, and the internal structure of the extended nominal phrase. I analyze the quantity words, most, least, and fewest as superlatives of quantificational adjectives (Q-adjectives), but argue that these are often embedded inside a covert measure construction, rather than directly modifying the overt noun. I also introduce novel data showing that the measure phrases that appear in overt pseudopartitive constructions have more complex internal structure than previously assumed. Specifically, they may contain adjectives, including superlative inflection …

English Influence On L2 Speakers’ Production Of Palatalization And Velarization, Jennifer C. Gabriele

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Irish is a Celtic language spoken in Ireland. It is currently endangered with only 73,803 people using the language on a daily basis as of 2016 (Official Office of Statistics, 2016). The reason for the decline is that English is the dominate language, pushing Irish to the periphery. Revitalization efforts have been put into place in an attempt to revitalize the language. There has been a growth in L2 speakers of Irish. The position of English as the dominate language, and high amounts of L2 speakers creates an environment where English is likely to influence the Irish language. The purpose …

Intergroup Variability In Personality Recognition, Arundhati Sengupta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Automatic Identification of personality in conversational speech has many applications in natural language processing such as leader identification in a meeting, adaptive dialogue systems, and dating websites. However, the widespread acceptance of automatic personality recognition through lexical and vocal characteristics is limited by the variability of error rate in a general purpose model among speakers from different demographic groups. While other work reports accuracy, we explored error rates of automatic personality recognition task using classification models for different genders and native language groups (L1). We also present a statistical experiment showing the influence of gender and L1 on the relation …

The Pragmatic Strategy Of Main-Clause Omission In Japanese: Its Contrast With Hebrew, And Its Learnability, Maayan Barkan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Typically, linguists study things that people actually say, but this dissertation focuses on what people do NOT say; specifically, it deals with main-clause omission. This paper presents an empirical study on main-clause omission constraints in Japanese after the concessive particle ga (‘although’/’but’), the first known controlled experiment of its kind in the literature. It investigates, from a pragmatic and discourse-analytic perspective, intuitive judgments regarding the allowance of main-clause omission in Japanese, in an attempt to reveal whether Japanese Native Speakers (JNS) use main-clause omission as a pragmatic strategy, as is suggested in the literature. If they do, then what triggers …

Describing Doggo-Speak: Features Of Doggo Meme Language, Jennifer Bivens

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Doggo-speak is a specialized way of writing most commonly associated with captions on Doggo memes, humorous images of dogs shared in online communities. This paper will explore linguistic features of Doggo-speak through analysis of social media posts by Doggo fan pages. It will use the discussed features as inputs to five machine learning classifiers and will show, through this classification task, that the discussed features are sufficient for distinguishing between Doggo-speak and more general English text.

Purepecha Aspirated Consonants And Their Phonetic Variants, Lluvia Camacho Cervantes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study describes phonetic realizations of aspirated phonemes in Purepecha [pua] from Azajo. The distribution of aspiration in Purepecha is limited to roots, a small number of spatial suffixes, one argument structure changing suffix, and clitics. Aspiration is never contrastive for inflexional suffixes, which occur in word final position. There are three basic allophones of aspirated segments: (i) post-aspirated; (ii) unaspirated, (iii) pre-aspirated, with pre-aspiration showing 4 distinct phonetic forms, depending on dialect, and phonetic context. Strengthening of pre-aspiration has been documented in the Lake and Sierra dialects as well as vowel lengthening in the Lake dialect. In Azajo Purepecha …

Multimodal Depression Detection: An Investigation Of Features And Fusion Techniques For Automated Systems, Michelle Renee Morales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Depression is a serious illness that affects a large portion of the world’s population. Given the large effect it has on society, it is evident that depression is a serious health issue. This thesis evaluates, at length, how technology may aid in assessing depression. We present an in-depth investigation of features and fusion techniques for depression detection systems. We also present OpenMM: a novel tool for multimodal feature extraction. Lastly, we present novel techniques for multimodal fusion. The contributions of this work add considerably to our knowledge of depression detection systems and have the potential to improve future systems by …

The Social Perception Of Three Features Of New York City English, Giacomo Castronovo Jr.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the late 19^th Century, the accent particular to New Yorker City natives of European descent has been negatively perceived by both the American general public and the speakers themselves. The stereotypification of New York City English speakers has largely been the cause of this negative evaluation, in that the features of the accent, as well as the unique New York discourse style, have long been utilized by actors and comedians to create characters of uneducated, uncultured provenance, as well as, all too often, unscrupulous behavior. Thus, the features of European-American New York City English appear to be inextricably …

Speaking Sober: Program Language As A Mechanism For Community Creation In Alcoholics Anonymous, Talya Wolf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) is a fellowship of more than two million members in 180 countries worldwide who are joined by their common desire to achieve and maintain sobriety. A.A. is comprised of small, self-sustaining groups of individuals who meet, typically weekly or biweekly, to share their successes and struggles and to provide support to their fellow alcoholics. There are no dues or requirements for membership other than the wish to stop drinking. The organization is not evangelical; it does not recruit, but rather welcomes those who wish to participate. The open nature of this program attracts individuals of all ages, …

Perspectives From The Streets And The Classrooms In The Same 'Hood: Linguistic Landscapes Of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Luis Guzman Valerio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the linguistic landscape of the neighborhood of Sunset Park, in Brooklyn, New York by taking into account both a main commercial avenue and a public school with a dual language bilingual program in English and Spanish. Sunset Park is a multi-ethnic and immigrant neighborhood (Hum, 2014). While research has been done into the linguistic landscape of streets, cities, and communities, on the one hand, and about the linguistic landscape in education, on the other, the co-existence of these two in the same context has barely been studied (cf. Maldonado, 2015). This dissertation makes a contribution to the …

Speech Perception In “Bubble” Noise: Korean Fricatives And Affricates By Native And Non-Native Korean Listeners, Jiyoung Choi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current study examines acoustic cues used by second language learners of Korean to discriminate between Korean fricatives and affricates in noise and how these cues relate to those used by native Korean listeners. Stimuli consist of naturally-spoken consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV) syllables: /sɑdɑ/, /s*ɑdɑ/, /tʃɑdɑ/, /tʃ^hɑdɑ/, and /tʃ*ɑdɑ/. In this experiment, the “bubble noise” methodology of Mandel at al. (2016) was used to identify the time-frequency locations of important cues in each utterance, i.e., where audibility of the location is significantly correlated with correct identification of the utterance in noise. Results show that non-native Korean listeners can discriminate between …

Revisiting Lockhart: A Case For A Conditional Operator, Eric J. Tsai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis presents a case for a binary modal conditional operator compatible with both circumstantial and epistemic modal bases. Certain contexts involving might conditionals require might to take wide-scope over a conditional proposition. A restrictor-view analysis of conditionals is unable to derive both the intuitive meaning of the might conditional and the necessary conditional proposition without positing a covert circumstantial necessity modal. However, based on observations of the temporal orientation of conditionals, such a modal lacks independent motivation. On the other hand, a binary modal conditional operator not only provides the necessary conditional proposition but is also able to derive …

Reasoning With Pseudowords: How Properties Of Novel Verbal Stimuli Influence Item Difficulty And Linguistic-Group Score Differences On Cognitive Ability Assessments, Paul Agnello

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pseudowords (words that are not real but resemble real words in a language) have been used increasingly as a technique to reduce contamination due to construct-irrelevant variance in assessments of verbal fluid reasoning (Gf). However, despite pseudowords being researched heavily in other psychology sub-disciplines, they have received little attention in cognitive ability testing contexts. Thus, there has been an assumption that all pseudowords work equally and work equally well for all test-takers. The current research examined three objectives with the first being whether changes to the pseudoword properties of length and wordlikeness (how much a pseudoword resembles a typical or …